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Monday, January 2, 2012

How Ron Paul's Libertarian Principles Support Racism

The furor over the racist newsletters published by Ron Paul in
the nineties is, in some ways, more revealing than the newsletters
themselves. In a series of responses by Paul and his supporters ranging
from anguished essays to angry dismissals to crazed conspiracy diagrams (check out page seven),
the basic shape of the Paul response has emerged. Paul argues that he
was completely unaware that, for many years, the newsletter purporting
to express his worldview consistently expressed vicious racism.
This is wildly implausible, but let’s grant the premise, because it
sets up the more interesting argument. Paul’s admirers have tried to
paint the racist newsletters as largely separate from his broader
worldview, an ungainly appendage that could be easily removed without
substantially altering the rest. Tim Carney argues:

Paul's indiscretions -- such as abiding 9/11
conspiracy theorists and allowing racist material in a newsletter
published under his name -- will be blown up to paint a scary
caricature. His belief in state's rights and property rights will be
distorted into support for Jim Crow and racism.

The stronger version of this argument, advanced by Paul himself,
is that racism is not irrelevant to his ideology, but that his ideology absolves him of racism. “Libertarians are incapable of being racist,” he has said,
“because racism is a collectivist idea, you see people in groups.” Most
libertarians may not take the argument quite as far as Paul does – many
probably acknowledge that it is possible for a libertarian to
hold racist views – but it does help explain their belief that racism
simply has no relation to the rest of Paul’s beliefs. They genuinely see
racism as a belief system that expresses itself only in the form of
coercive government power. In Paul’s world, state-enforced
discrimination is the only kind of discrimination. A libertarian
by definition opposes discrimination because libertarians oppose the
state. He cannot imagine social power exerting itself through any other
form.

You can see this premise at work in Paul’s statements about civil
rights. In a 2004 statement condemning the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Paul
laid out his doctrinaire libertarian opposition. “[T]he forced
integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial
tensions while diminishing individual liberty,” he wrote. “The federal
government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of
private property owners to use their property as they please and to form
(or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties.”

Paul views every individual as completely autonomous, and he is
incapable of imagining any force other than government power that could
infringe upon their actual liberty. White people won’t hire you? Then go
form a contract with somebody else. Government intervention can only
make things worse.

The same holds true of Paul’s view of sexual harassment. In his 1987 book,
he wrote that women who suffer sexual harassment should simply go work
somewhere else: “Employee rights are said to be valid when employers
pressure employees into sexual activity. Why don’t they quit once the
so-called harassment starts?” This reaction also colored his son Rand
Paul’s response to sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain,
which was to rally around Cain and grouse that he can’t even tell jokes around women any more.

This is an analysis that makes sense only within the airtight
confines of libertarian doctrine. It dissipates with even the slightest
whiff of exposure to external reality. The entire premise rests upon
ignoring the social power that dominant social groups are able to wield
outside of the channels of the state. Yet in the absence of government
protection, white males, acting solely through their exercise of freedom
of contract and association, have historically proven quite capable of
erecting what any sane observer would recognize as actual impediments to
the freedom of minorities and women.

The most fevered opponents of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s
– and, for that matter, the most fervent defenders of slavery a century
before – also usually made their case in in process terms rather than
racist ones. They stood for the rights of the individual, or the rights
of the states, against the federal Goliath. I am sure Paul’s motives
derive from ideological fervor rather than a conscious desire to oppress
minorities. But the relationship between the abstract principles of his
worldview and the ugly racism with which it has so frequently been
expressed is hardly coincidental.